Those tasked with staying abreast of financial regulations and the agencies that enforce them are keenly aware of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), its stated mission and the numerous controversies that revolve around it. However, a recent survey shows that a vast majority of the people the CFPB is supposed to protect have little to no knowledge of its existence.
Approximately 81 percent of 507 adults surveyedby CreditCards.com indicated that they did not know enough about the bureau to say whether they were for or against it. Overall, respondents who did offer their opinions of the bureau supported it by a 3-to-1 ratio. Republicans favored it by 2-to-1 and Democrats by about 4-to-1.
Democrats have spoken out to defend the CFPB from attacks by its mostly Republican critics but lack substantial public support, likely due, in part, to the lack of public awareness about the bureau. Changing that fact, however, might simply be a matter of launching a strong public relations campaign, given other evidence collected in the survey.
Nearly as many people as said they didn’t know enough about the bureau to weigh in indicated they were in favor of the concept behind it. Eighty percent of respondents supported the idea of a federal agency dedicated to protecting consumers from unfair, deceptive or abusive acts or practices.
“There’s no question consumers want more oversight of Wall Street and predatory lenders rather than less,” Former CFPB Assistant Director Rohit Chopra, now a senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America, said in an article by CreditCards.com. “So many consumers have had an experience where they feel cheated or ripped off.”
Chopra offered a theory as to why the bureau may not be well-known among consumers.
“When regulatory agencies are working well, the public may not even know it,” Chopra said. “When you take a pill and don’t get poisoned, you may not know the FDA was overseeing clinical trials for that class of drug.”
The fact that companies generally issue restitution directly to harmed consumers, rather than funneling restitution through the bureau, also may contribute to the agency’s lack of recognition.
Chopra said in the article that although ordering companies to credit customers’ bills is the fastest way to reimburse them, “it’s not the most effective PR strategy.” Chopra said that the CFPB does not send out checks with the agency’s name on them because doing so would constitute “political gimmicks,” which he said the bureau avoids.
The bureau has had its share of enforcement actions against several highly-recognizable companies, such as Wells Fargo, Capital One, Citi, TransUnion, Equifax and Mastercard, making the fact that it is largely unrecognizable among consumers all the more interesting.